This story comes to you from MPR News through a partnership with Sahan Journal.
Jennifer Cortez’s husband was set to be released from immigration detention at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building the morning of Oct. 2.
A federal judge ruled Yader Cortez Andino’s warrantless arrest was illegal and he should be released immediately.
Cortez called his wife around 11 a.m. from Whipple and said something didn’t feel right. Although he signed release papers and his belongings were returned to him, immigration agents directed him out a back door, not to the front lobby where his lawyer waited for him.
“Not even 15 minutes later I get a phone call again,” Jennifer said. On the call was her husband, telling her he’d been re-arrested. She couldn’t believe it.
The two parent three kids together. Jennifer brought the older two children into the relationship, and the youngest, Arianna, is their biological child.
“We put up banners, we put up balloons, we were so excited he was coming home. And then to just have to let down all my kids,” Jennifer said.
“You feel powerless,” she said.
Yader Cortez Andino is the third person MPR News has spoken to who was immediately re-arrested by ICE at the Whipple building after a federal judge ordered their release.
A man from Mexico was re-arrested just steps outside the Whipple building on Sept. 25. A man from Guatemala didn’t even make it outside the doors of Whipple when he was re-arrested on Oct. 1.
In each case, the men had filed successful habeas petitions challenging their detainment on several grounds, including that their arrests were illegal in the first place.
This strategy comes as the grounds for filing habeas petitions have narrowed in Minnesota. In March, an appeals court decision sided with the Trump administration’s novel and controversial interpretation of immigration law. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide if ICE’s new policy of holding immigrants in detention indefinitely without offering them a bond hearing is legal.
‘We don’t even understand why we have to walk them out the building’
Court records and statements made by ICE officials indicate the strategy is more widespread than the three men MPR News spoke to.
Court records suggest two other men were ordered released and then immediately re-arrested at the Whipple building Sept. 9 and Sept. 22.
In the Sept. 9 case, the man’s shoulder was dislocated during his re-arrest, according to court documents.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan reviewed video footage provided by ICE of that re-arrest and determined ICE agents “swarmed” the man as he stepped outside the Whipple building, according to court documents. Bryan also determined ICE agents failed to effectively serve the man an arrest warrant, instead waving a folded piece of paper in front of him “for at most three seconds” before handcuffing him.
“The Court cannot agree that a reasonable person would have felt free to leave when exiting the detention facility and immediately being stopped by ICE officers,” Bryan wrote in his second release order.
He also wrote that if the Sept. 9 re-arrest is considered lawful it “would render habeas relief meaningless.”
MPR News asked the White House, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement multiple questions about this strategy, including when it started, whether ICE was directed by DHS or the White House to re-arrest people in this way, the size of the ICE legal teams who review habeas cases, how much money ICE spends housing people in detention who they’ve re-arrested and why people with pending asylum claims or green card applications would be selected as candidates for re-arrest.
The White House referred the questions to DHS. DHS and ICE did not respond to the request for comment.
However, Cortez’s lawyer said ICE officials told her on Oct. 2 that this strategy is routine.
Nervous something might go wrong
Danielle Oxendine Molliver doesn’t normally meet her clients at Whipple when they are released from detention.
But Jennifer Cortez was nervous something might go wrong with her husband’s scheduled release because of the way his immigration case had been handled in the last year.
Yader Cortez was arrested by ICE on his way to work on June 30, without a warrant. Cortez said ICE agents cited his recent DWI during his arrest, but a judge had sentenced him to probation — not incarceration — the day before.
For months, Jennifer acted as his advocate, hiring a lawyer to file a habeas petition for her husband and then hiring a new lawyer, Oxendine Molliver, to take over the habeas when progress in the case was slow. Yader Cortez had a pending asylum case based on his escape from a dictatorship in his home country of Nicaragua. He had also applied for a green card in August 2025, after he married Jennifer.
Oxendine Molliver arrived early on Oct. 2, around 8 a.m. and asked when her client would be released. She said an administrative staffer at Whipple told her Cortez was still being processed and she should come back around noon.
“I went to the window and I asked him specifically, ‘You’re not going to re-arrest him?’” Oxendine Molliver told MPR News. “And his quote was, ‘No, we don’t do that.’”
Oxendine Molliver drove to her office to wait. As she was on her way back to pick up Cortez a few hours later, she got a “hysterical” call from his wife.
“They told him he was being released. They handed him all of his property. They handed him his check refund from the commissary,” Oxendine Molliver said.
Cortez said he was even given back his shoes with laces, which he wasn’t allowed to wear in detention.
“He asked them to please escort him out the main door to his attorney. They said, ‘No, no, no, no. You’re going to go out this door,’” Oxendine Molliver said.
According to Cortez, he was directed out a back door. The door was closed behind him and waiting for him were ICE agents in plain clothes. He said the agents told him the judge was wrong to order his release and they arrested him again. Then they told him to remove his laces.
Oxendine Molliver arrived at Whipple to the sound of Cortez yelling her name, desperate to meet with her. After they spoke, Oxendine Molliver demanded to meet with a representative of ICE who could shed light on what just happened to her client.
Two ICE officials in uniform met with her, she said. They didn’t share their names. They seemed confused by how upset Oxendine Molliver was. One suggested she calm down.
“I basically said, I do feel crazy. This situation is crazy. You all are acting crazy, and what about humanity?” Oxendine Molliver said.
Oxendine Molliver asked them on what grounds they re-detained her client and when ICE began this new practice of instant re-arrests.
“It’s not new; we’ve been doing this since May,” one official told her. “We don’t even understand why we have to walk them out the building,” he added.
The officials told her ICE has a “whole legal team working on these habeases” and they identify “good candidates for re-arrest.”
One person on that legal team is attorney Courtney Campbell with the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, or OPLA, the largest legal team within Homeland Security.
Oxendine Molliver also met with Campbell who said she advised Enforcement and Removal Operations, a division within ICE, that Cortez could be re-arrested. Campbell said nothing in U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell’s order prohibited re-arrest.
Oxendine Molliver told Cortez that she would fight his re-arrest. But it was late on a Friday and it became clear that at the very least he’d be back in custody over the weekend.
‘Made a legal resident over the weekend’
Judge Blackwell disagreed with ICE’s interpretation of his order.
On Monday, Oct. 5, he wrote that the government had failed to follow his order requiring Cortez’s immediate release and an update confirming the “the time, date and location” of the release within 48 hours.
“Respondents must comply with the Courts order immediately, and must file a letter no later than 4:00 p.m. on October 5, 2026, showing cause why they should not be held in contempt for violating the Courts order requiring an update within 48 hours of the ordered release,” Blackwell wrote.
In a belated status report filed on behalf of Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, attorney Carl Berry wrote that Cortez was released Oct. 2 — for three minutes.
Oxendine Molliver also filed a motion asking Blackwell to enforce his release order and spelled out in detail the bait-and-switch.
In a final twist, Cortez’s pending green card application was approved just after his re-arrest. MPR News reviewed the online status notice posted on Oct. 3 that said his case was approved.
“[ICE] knew it was pending. They knew it had been expedited. They knew it was going to happen any day,” Oxendine Molliver said.
“He was made a legal resident over the weekend.”
Cortez was released Monday evening, Oct. 5.
“I think it was sort of a perfect storm,” Oxendine Molliver said. “I think that they pulled this really crappy maneuver, and they kind of got caught doing it.”
Oxendine Molliver said Cortez earning his freedom is a win, but he’s “completely traumatized.”
And his case is unusual. After a dubious arrest, people can go months in detention, sometimes paying for multiple lawyers, and only a fraction will be released back to their families.
“Now we’re in these huge litigious battles, and these families don’t have the money and they don’t have the time,” Oxendine Molliver said.
Correction (Oct. 13, 2026): An earlier version of this story misstated the month Yader Cortez Andino applied for his green card.
